


time waiting for you

by blurhawaii



Category: True Detective
Genre: Implied Relationships, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 09:24:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18029114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blurhawaii/pseuds/blurhawaii
Summary: Wayne steps in and out of time like he simply took a wrong turn a few miles back. It’s a miracle he makes it to 2015 at all, with a sense of direction like that.





	time waiting for you

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [[Translation]time waiting for you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18039227) by [isaakfvkampfer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isaakfvkampfer/pseuds/isaakfvkampfer)



> my one line of notes for this thing: guy hands out business cards to everyone he meets - no kids, sowing seeds? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Wayne steps in and out of time like he simply took a wrong turn a few miles back. He treads down a familiar hallway looking for his kitchen and instead gets that little house on Shoepick Lane in 1980. Dark shuttered up inside like there’s no one home, the only way he’s ever really known it. It’s a miracle he makes it to 2015 at all, with a sense of direction like that.

He takes in the scope of Roland’s 2015 home with eyes as sharp as ever, recalls framed photographs he looked at one time and swiftly disregarded, and then between one barbed thought and the next, he detours. Wayne treads the last twenty-four years of silence like it’s another misstep. Finds himself before another front door, knows instinctively it’s Roland’s, and assumes a wife and kids logically lie behind it.

Guiding him back to where that fork in the road split is a painful experience for them both.

Roland’s legacy these days consists of a breadcrumb trail of rough-edged business cards forgotten at the bottom of desk drawers across the state. The most notable sits in an evidence lock-up, tucked inside a wallet with the rest of Tom’s things.

 

 

The door to his room has been pushed open when he comes back from the restroom. He suspects Wayne of getting lost somewhere between dinner downstairs and an open-ended evening from a stretch in 1990 but when Roland steps in after him -- he finds Henry, grown and broad shouldered, flicking through a paperback he left abandoned on the nightstand.

“Geez, kid. Not you too.”

Henry doesn’t act like he’s been caught out, no reason why he should. He lingers on the inside cover for a moment longer, a name penciled in then left to age, before he replaces the book and turns around. “Sorry, man,” he says, meaning not a lick of it. “I know I shouldn’t be in here. It’s just--it’s weird, you understand?”

Roland holds up his hands, as if to say no hard feelings, says nothing about how he’s been soaking up the presence of a life lived in this room, ever since he moved in. “Not a problem. It was yours first, I get that. I find your dad in here all the time.”

“That’s not the reassurance you mean it as, Sir.”

“Just means he misses you, is all.”

They share the small space of the bedroom like they’re crossing a time zone. Gain or lose an hour, it largely means little, nothing’s changed but the clock. Ever ticking, backwards and forwards, young and old, they both still ended up here at one time or another. Dinner invitations weren’t something he and Wayne did often as partners, the couple times they tried always ended in someone going home to finger the trigger. Roland didn’t get to know Henry as a kid but he respects the man he became.

A week ago, Henry had come to him and slipped him a crumpled address on a torn off corner of paper. Wayne, try as he might, sometimes forgets whether his boy is thirteen or thirty but Roland never has any trouble remembering the man’s a detective, just like his daddy, a time loop in curious effect.

“I’ve read all the classics,” Henry says now, waving a hand towards the bookshelf next to the window, a telltale wedge is missing leaving the whole thing italicised. “Being the son of an English teacher, always felt like I had to.”

Roland knows a dangled rope when he hears it and gladly bites down. “You ever read her book?”

“Not until I left for college. Not until I’d put this house at a distance. But, yeah, I read it.”

Roland’s only ever made it as far as the dedication page himself -- a little slip of paper adorned with an address holds his place there, shut up in the drawer by his borrowed bed, somewhere Wayne is unlikely to stumble on it -- and the text printed there reaches out to every family that suffered but her own. To anyone that has ever felt the ripple of a wave caused by such unimaginable grief. Roland has always felt undeserving of that group, underqualified, despite this case leaving him capsized several times over.

“I got to thinking,” Roland says to the room, far softer than his years have allowed, “that I should probably read it one of these days. Before it’s too late.”

 

 

_Detective West,_ Amelia writes, _shoulders the responsibility of Mr Purcell like it’s his God given duty._

_I would watch the various interviews Mr Purcell gave and, like most, saw a man who wore his multitude of losses like a top layer against the chill. It is my unique position, however, that has granted me another perspective. Around the bleeding edges of time that bridge one day to the next, I would often spy a heavy ringed hand here, tucked into the bend of an elbow. A flash of blond hair there, a guard dog set on permanent watch. A jacket that has stayed the same style but grown darker over the years, like a leech feeding on neighbouring grief. And, in all that time, I would think to myself: Thank God, for at least there’s someone looking out for this man._

_We never really know a person until we’ve experienced a tragedy at their side and theirs is a relationship built on only this._

_It is perhaps inevitable then that Tom Purcell’s death be as tragic as his life._

“She never wrote that,” says Roland with care, reaching his hand out halfway.

“Are you sure? I could’ve sworn--”

“Wayne, Tom died in ‘90. There’s no way that could be in the book. You must be getting things tangled. Maybe--” just the idea settles wrong in Roland’s stomach but he powers through, “--maybe the two of you discussed it between yourselves but she sure as hell never wrote about us like that.”

Wayne sags back in his armchair. He rubs at his brow with a wrinkled hand and loses yet another intangible hold on the woman he knew to be his wife. “Told her so much over the years,” he grinds out. “Too much. I see it now, how we fed into each other’s tunnel visions ‘til we was both blind.”

“You were married.” Roland shrugs, the man with the least amount of authority on the subject. “Seems only fair you got to gossip with your other partner.”

“Nah,” Wayne drawls from behind his hand, frustration giving way to easy depression. When he lifts his head and looks Roland over, he’s anything but blind. “You’re right, we ain’t never talked ‘bout that.”

He’d been so sure earlier, spouting lines that sounded like Amelia was in the room with them. Confident turns of phrase that Roland has been reading every night before bed. It’s slow going because reading the words of people now long dead makes Roland’s heart race until it’s fit to burst. He’s made a habit of swapping it out for one of Henry’s many childhood classics; a cowardly escape, he thinks, until one night has him flicking back to the name penciled in the cover, expecting Henry’s childish scrawl -- he gets Amelia’s maiden name instead and is dragged back into that never ending cycle. Families he's always on the edge of.

“Ain’t anything to talk about,” Roland says, a past resident of ‘80, ‘90 and now the present, with absolutely nothing to show for it.

“I might have wondered, one time or another, whether that was why you never married.”

“Now, Purple,” Roland pushes up out of his chair -- harder now than it ever was before -- and claps his hand onto Wayne’s shoulder as he makes his cowardly escape, “I ever strike you as such a romantic as that?”

 

 

Roland steps in and out of time like he simply took a wrong turn a few miles back. He falls bruised and bloody out a bar in 1990 and ends up standing before that flat empty lot on Shoepick Lane in 2015.

Dead grass in neat lines the only indication a house ever stood here. There was a brief time when Roland thought about them both growing old -- not together, he was never that much of an optimist -- but peripherally.

A number in a wallet, taken out and looked at on occasion.

Now he gets back in his car to the haunting sound of Amelia’s voice saying, _Thank God, for at least there’s someone looking out for this man._


End file.
